Read a good Lost book lately?
07/02/08 12:19 PM
By ED BARK
Four seasons and 47 volumes later, Lost has turned another page.
The mindbending ABC series now has its own "book club" on abc.com. Oprah's probably not worried yet. But executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse figure you'll enrich yourself, if not them, by reading a few of the hard- and soft bounds pictured or mentioned during the series.
"To paraphrase one of our heroes, Stephen King, to be a writer one must first be a reader," they write to Lost fans. "We find ourselves constantly striving for even a small measure of the accomplishment of what all these authors have achieved in their books.
"Pick up any of them and experience the richness of storytelling, character, and theme, and then allow your imagination to connect all that back into our show. We can't promise you any of these books will lead you to answers about Lost, but we can promise you'll be enriched for having read them."
There's ample time. Lost isn't scheduled to return until January with what will be its second-to-last season. So if you want to connect or re-connect with the aforementioned King, he's represented with Carrie.
The complete list of 47 books is on the Web site, but here are a few talking points compiled by unclebarky.com:
***Only two authors have had more than one book on Lost. Charles Dickens is represented by A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend, his last novel. Lewis Carroll is saluted with Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
***Five books figure into the storylines of two different episodes. They are Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; William Golding's Lord of the Flies; Richard Adams' Watership Down; Aldous Huxley's Island and Gary Troup's Bad Twin. Hmm.
***The two-hour pilot episode of Lost made reference to Heart of Darkness, Alice In Wonderland, Island, Watership Down and B.F. Skinner's Walden Two. Double hmm.
***Yours truly has bought just one book directly because of Lost. It's Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, prominently featured in the last episode of Season Two and heartbreakingly tied to Desmond Hume's love for Penny Widmore.
I must admit, though, that the 892-page Penguin softcover version has remained unread since arriving from amazon.com, one of the proud sponsors of unclebarky.com.
So maybe it's best to get busy with it, and "fall through the rabbit hole with us!" as Lindelof and Cuse say at the end of their "Dear Lost Reader" letter.
Let's start right now: "In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in . . ."
|